


Lesser of Two Evils

by dogmatix



Category: Dexter Series - All Media Types, Supernatural
Genre: Demons, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-21
Updated: 2012-12-21
Packaged: 2017-11-21 20:21:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/601697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dogmatix/pseuds/dogmatix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dexter is faced with a choice he didn't realize he had.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lesser of Two Evils

**Author's Note:**

  * For [zihna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/zihna/gifts).



I lay in wait, forcing myself to be patient. The moon danced above the waves, its deep-throated, chuckling call rippling on the waves below. It pulled at me like the tide, warm and inexorable. It would be tonight. It had to be tonight. The Dark Passenger added its sibilant voice, urging me on as it teased at the reins of my self-control.

Mr. Elback would be our dance partner tonight. He worked at a nightclub – the early shift. He’d been a busy little boy these past two years. Two years since his murder charge had gotten thrown out on a technicality, and he’d been released back into the wild to kill again. I had all the proof I needed, thanks to some unauthorized snooping and a sturdy shovel. 

Taking on active cases were all fine and well, but really it was time to stop skirting so close to the limelight. With Lumen gone back to her dearly doting parents, I was left to settle back into the shadows I called home. The light was not, after all, for darkly dashing Dexter.

A soft hush of feathers and anticipation over my psyche brought my attention back to the nightclub. And here came Mr. Elback now. Alone, good. That had been the one uncertain factor this night – Mr. Elback sometimes liked to bring a lady friend out with him. Sometimes they even left his dreary little apartment alive the next morning.

But the moon chuckled and my Passenger curled lazily against my back like a contented cat as our prey swayed and gyrated to the silent music in his head, car keys twisting in their lock. My every nerve was on edge as I scanned the small, tucked away bend of the parking lot – empty, as I’d predicted. Quivering with eagerness and anticipation, I gathered myself to leap forward-

Pain. Darkness swallowed me.

The hunt had made me careless, inattentive. And like all sins, it had come back to bite me.

“You can stop pretending, asshole.”

I looked up from where I was sitting slumped in a chair. My head was pounding, and my hands were… not bound. In fact, I wasn’t tied up in any way. My captor was either terminally stupid or somehow deluded.

He was also ruggedly handsome in a ‘bad-boy’ kind of way, short hair and battered leather jacket combining nicely with a face I knew from America’s Most Wanted. The only problem was, Dean Winchester was supposed to be dead.

“How did you find me?” I asked, pasting on a smile out of habit.

“Luck,” Winchester said with a snort that meant it apparently wasn’t the good kind of luck. “I saw you snooping a few days ago and, well, here we are.” 

Yes, here we were. It was my very own kill room, plastic still hung meticulously over every surface, kill table shoved carelessly to one side. Winchester knew too much, but that wouldn’t be a problem if I could just get the upper hand – he certainly matched the Code in every particular.

I was wracking my brain trying to remember everything I could about Winchester. It wasn’t much – I knew of him, but it had been years since he’d been in the news, and his kills had always been a bit too random, too jumbled for my tastes. But there had certainly been enough of them.

“At first I wasn’t sure what you were, thought you might just be some whacko for a while. But the sulfur gave you away. And the EMF, but mostly the sulfur.” Winchester picked up an old book – a bible? – and started paging through it.

If he hadn’t been insane before he faked his own death, he’d apparently gone that way between then and now. “Sulfur?”

“Yeah, you know. Brimstone. Kinda like your guys’ calling card and all.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, still smiling, “I’m not sure what you mean-“

“Look, I’ve seen plenty of you demonic assholes before, so just stow the act,” he glowered, raising the book.

Enough was enough. He didn’t appear to have a gun, and I was close enough that I was relatively sure I could get to him before he could drop the book and go for it. I stood, intending to rush him across the four or five feet of empty air that separated us.

And was brought up short.

I couldn’t move. Something – some invisible force – was holding me back. The Dark Passenger, who’d been dead silent up till now, rustled agitatedly. There was anger there, the urge to kill, but also…. Apprehension? Not quite fear, but within spitting distance of it. I was, to put it mildly, stunned.

“Oh c’mon, you thought I was that stupid?” Winchester asked scornfully, and glanced down at the floor. I followed suit, and blinked at the intricate design drawn in white on the cement.

“What. What is it?” The lines didn’t quite waver in my sight, but it felt like they wanted to, or, no, maybe it was that my eyes didn’t want to focus on the design, like matching poles on two magnets repulsing each other.

“A demon who doesn’t know a devil’s trap when he’s stuck in it? What are they teaching you these days?” Winchester mocked, and started to read.

The air pushed hard on me, thickening until it felt like I was breathing water. My legs went out from under me and I sprawled half-on the chair, hand clutching spasmodically at its seat. Winchester continued to read, voice growing louder, more authoritative. The Passenger felt icy-hot, rage and fear swirling like a sickness inside it, inside me. Winchester’s voice was lost to the pounding of blood in my own ears, and the scream that tore itself from me was like nothing human. The Passenger was being lifted from me like a veil, swaths of fine spiderweb connections ripping loose in chunks, but still it clung to me with bloody-minded determination.

I was frozen, an icy statue looking up at the dark, billowing cloud of roiling shadows that was my Dark Passenger. A demon. My Passenger wasn't a part of my fractured psyche, it was a separate entity, posessing me and driving me to kill. And Winchester was rending it from me with every word that fell from his lips.

Everything seemed to grey out for a moment. Where the Dark Passenger was being uprooted, it was being replaced by something else. Fear. Gut-clenching, icy, incapacitating _fear_. It swept in like a storm tide, paralyzing me, choking my voice into silence. I was going to die, and rather than the philosophical contemplation I gave the matter otherwise, it was instilling in me now a primal terror that defied reason and logic, that stank of death and old blood and a small, cramped space where I sat and cried and cried and cried.

The Dark Passenger was connected to me by the merest wisps now, only its own stubborn will keeping us bound, and even those last fragile bonds were beginning to give. Outside us a wind whirled around our kill-room. I was trading my Passenger for fear and blood and pain without end. For _humanity_.

There was no conscious thought to action. I was on my knees, half-in and half-out of the intricate design traced on the floor. My hand against the lines felt like it was being flayed with acid. I twisted the flat of my palm against the design, grinding into the pain. As if a switch had been flipped, the smeared chalk leapt into focus and the pain winked out. 

I took Winchester in a flying tackle, flinging us both back several paces. Winchester’s head hit the kill-table with an audible thud. But I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything except the glorious wash of relief and numbness as my Dark Passenger slid back in, smothering the screaming terror within me with a hot rush of killing urge.

I almost killed Winchester in that first flush of bloodlust. But then the returning calm pointed out – quite annoyingly – that if Winchester actually was hunting demons, his police records might be incorrect, and thus he might not fit the Code. 

I was rather annoyed with myself for that, and almost ignored it. What did it really matter, after all? The Dark Passenger snarled, anger and bloodlust beating at my brain. But no, the Code was the Code, and I’d get no satisfaction from a messy kill anyway, not the same way I would from a careful dance of predator and prey. 

Well, then I’d just have to make sure. So I tied Winchester to the chair, and wondered what wonderful new vistas of prey might be opening to me, even as I started going through his pockets looking for incriminating evidence.

Demons. Who would have guessed?


End file.
